A gyro is a sandwich made by roasting lamb, slicing it, and rolling it into a pita. The sandwich originated several decades ago at Greek lunch counters in the United States, and therefore derives its name, pronounced yheero, from Greek: guros, meaning a spiral or a turn, was anglicized as gyro and applied to the sandwich because the meat turns on a spit as it roasts. The name gyro is obviously related to the English words gyroscope and gyrate, which developed from the same Greek source. However, gyro is also related to some surprising words in other languages including the Irish word guaire, meaning hair of the head (curls of hair are like spirals), and the Gaelic word guairdeam, meaning vertigo or dizziness. Incidentally, it is also possible that gyro inspired hero sandwich, the name of a meat-filled, submarine-shaped sandwich; admittedly, hero sandwich appeared in print before gyro (in 1955 as opposed to 1971), but “foreign” words such as gyro often exist in spoken English for decades before they appear in print. If so, then there is nothing “heroic” about the hero sandwich, its name being nothing more than a misinterpretation of a Greek sandwich’s name.<\/p>\n
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A gyro is a sandwich made by roasting lamb, slicing it, and rolling it into a pita. The sandwich originated several decades ago at Greek lunch counters in the United States, and therefore derives its name, pronounced yheero, from Greek: guros, meaning a spiral or a turn, was anglicized as gyro and applied to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a"],"yoast_head":"\n